| This study explores how geographical displacement influenced the writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko, who lived most of his life and wrote the majority of his works outside his homeland, Ukraine. It embraces a broad approach to displaced experience (travel, emigre, expatriation, exile) viewing it as a complex process of negotiation between different social and cultural spaces. This dissertation demonstrates that Vynnychenko's stay abroad determined his social, cultural, and philosophical outlook, his ideological preoccupations, his attitude toward the homeland and hostland society, as well as his choice of themes and settings.;During the years 1920-25 Vynnychenko experienced a particularly extreme sense of uprootedness. I examine the tensions between his desires for Ukrainian statehood and his equal commitment to communist ideals. I also point out his conflicts with the diaspora and the Bolsheviks; and the requirements to balance politics and literature as careers. At this time he moved from his old provocative moral and family themes to the three-volume utopian Soniachna mashyna, a multifaceted novel that aroused radically different responses in the homeland and in the West. As an ideological and philosophical polemic with both the Soviet Union and Western capitalism, this work served to channel Vynnychenko's uncertainty about the present by allowing him to project an idealized future.;In the Conclusion I offer a summary of my thesis and outline Vynnychenko's further development in displacement from 1925 to 1951.;The work focuses on two periods (1907-14 and 1920-25). Although during the first period Vynnychenko's main focus was his homeland, I analyze how Vynnychenko's sojourn in Europe significantly enhanced his modernist views and helped him develop a new vision through travel, contact with various people, self-education, admiration of art, and the experience of personal freedom. Despite the joys of his initial expatriation, Vynnychenko also experienced the bitterness of exile and nostalgia for the homeland. His absence from Ukraine not only strengthened his national preoccupations, but also marked a tendency to embrace abstract ideas, sharpened his critical perspective of the homeland, and allowed him to pursue provocative modernist themes. |
